Seeing positive trends in travel, continue to invest in technology at steady pace: MakeMyTrip Group CTO

New Delhi: Travel is back with a vengeance after the difficult Covid years and online travel company MakeMyTrip has moved beyond the traditional business-to-consumer segment to line up new offerings and new partners, says its group CTO Sanjay Mohan.

“Over the last few years, we have expanded beyond our usual B2C space, and have become a travel platform, offering travel products to channels outside of our popular, consumer-facing, travel super-app,” Mohan told PTI, citing new features such as myBiz for corporate, myPartner for travel agents and myAffiliate for affiliate partners.

Moving swiftly to capitalise on the Indian diaspora in the Gulf countries where the brand is quite well-known, MakeMyTrip has also entered the Gulf market, he said.

MakeMyTrip, which has a total transacted customer base of over 60 million, continues to invest in technology at a steady pace, he added.

"Even during the Covid years, we were investing in technology and building interesting use cases for the customers."

MakeMyTrip's core competence is travel and teaming up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) helps it to keep sharp focus on operations and innovation, as technology allows on-demand infra scale up and cost benefits, according to Mohan.

Excerpts from the interview:

Q: What are some of the key milestones for MakeMyTrip, and the growth drivers for you in the Indian travel and tourism industry?

A: MakeMyTrip was built on a bet on the digital medium, and has been at the forefront of digital commerce for almost two decades now.

Over the last few years, we have also become more of a travel super-app, covering the entire gamut of products and offerings that one could possibly think of when you think of travel.

Also, over the last few years, we have expanded beyond our usual B2C space, and have become a travel platform, offering travel products to channels outside of our popular, consumer-facing, travel super-app.

MyBiz is our corporate travel offering, available to corporates to enable their employees to purchase travel products online. It uses the familiar, customer-friendly interface that MakeMyTrip offers.

MyPartner is a platform for travel agents who now have the entire repertoire of MakeMyTrip’s travel products that they can sell to their customers – for the segment of consumers that find it more convenient to book tickets through their friendly, neighbourhood travel-agent.

TripMoney is a travel fintech initiative encompassing travel insurance, travel-loans, EMI solutions, and foreign exchange solutions.

MyAffiliate is a B2B2C API (application programming interface) capability through which our affiliates such as Amazon Pay, GPay, PhonePe, HDFC, etc offer our travel products on their sites.

Parallelly, we also launched our site in Arabic in Dubai to build our international footprint in the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council), the Gulf countries.

Q: How has travel made a comeback post-Covid and what broad trends do you see in the market?

A: Let me give you some indicative numbers. Daily passenger data, that is how many passengers are flying in a day, has been hitting record numbers lately. According to media reports, over 4.5 lakh passengers are flying on a given day all over India.

This is almost a growth of an estimated 51 per cent year-over-year.

So yes, travel is back with a vengeance and numbers are actually validating that.

Internally too, we are noting a trend towards more immersive and relaxed travel itineraries. For example, average room nights per booking is on an upward trend, which means that people want relaxed vacations or leisure travel with their families.

Nearby destinations are becoming more popular, and we are experiencing greater demand for homestays and family stays, for instance.

Q: What is the size and scale of your operations, in terms of number of customers and other key business metrics, and what are your growth rates?

A: We have a total transacted customer base of over 60 million. To give you a sense of scale, we provide accommodation options in over 2,000 cities in India alone. Three out of ten domestic flyers book their tickets on the MakeMyTrip platform.

Our platform lists 5,600-plus holiday packages through a broad omnichannel strategy. myBiz is already the Largest Travel Management Company in the B2B space, and growing very rapidly.

A significant percentage of travel agents across the country source travel services for their customers from myPartner.

We entered the GCC market during the pandemic but have already become the leading OTA in the market in the flights segment within two short years.

Q: What are the technology and digital pillars that support your operations?

A: We continue to invest in technology at a steady pace. Even during the Covid years, we were steadily investing in technology and building interesting use cases for the customers.

From an engineering perspective, our focus is on two aspects. First, on building robust horizontal platforms, on top of which we build all of our new offerings like myBiz, myPartner, and myAffiliate.

Second, our focus is on leveraging the vast corpus of travel-intent data for all of India. We use data analytics and AI to gain insights into customer behaviour and preferences.

This enables us to offer customised, personalised recommendations and experiences to each customer.

Q: Can you describe the solution and workloads you are running on Amazon Web Services (AWS)?

A: All of our businesses are on AWS right now. Everything that we do both outward and inward facing, all of it is on AWS and has been so for quite a few years. AWS allows us to leverage cutting edge computing capabilities and allows us to run new experiments, without worrying about infra provisioning.

AWS cloud also helps us on the availability, reliability and performance because obviously when you are a cloud and you can horizontally scale, you are doing much better on availability, and offer a much more responsive and delightful experience for the customer.

Q: In terms of business outcomes, what benefits have you experienced as a result of running on AWS?

A: The biggest advantage is agility. We can bring new offerings to the market at a fast pace. Obviously, the underlying tech platform helps, but even having infinite pool of infrastructure available on-demand...if we have to offer new service to a new segment, new country, the infra is ready and available for us to launch.

The shared responsibility model of security also helps. Plus the variable pricing - you pay what you use - is a big advantage too.

Leveraging AWS provides us with the obvious benefit of being able to abstract away the infrastructure maintenance and management and focus on core competencies.

Secondly, our unique relationship with AWS keeps us at the very forefront of innovations in the technology and the computing world.

In this dynamic ecosystem we can rely on AWS to provide us with resilient innovations to aid us in staying ahead of the curve. Frankly, I really believe that has greatly helped us retain the market leader position and will continue to do so in the years to come.